[LEDE-DEV] PHP at build time

[Philip Prindeville]

Hi.

I’m working on a project (some GUI interfaces and a back end for generating traffic shaping using netfilter/tc) written in PHP7.

It uses PHP’s “composer”.

I could install composer (it’s only ever run once on a released project) on the target machine, and run it on first boot.

But that seems like a waste of space, and if there are any packaging problems, I’d rather detect them early on at build time.

But that requires having PHP in the build environment at build time.

Which is the lessor of the two evils?

And do we go with the OS distribution of PHP7 (assuming it’s available… and it’s not on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS)?  Or build a staging version of?

What are the currently “blessed” list of OSes and releases to build on, anyway?  I thought I had seen a list somewhere a while ago calling out Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 LTS, but couldn’t find it again when I went looking for it.

One last and unrelated question:  I tried to build a package (syslog-ng) in parallel mode on a 12-core system, and it built fine.  But I understand that parallel build conditions are sometimes hard to reproduce.  How does one adequately prove that a package is parallel-build safe?

Thanks,

-Philip